


Anyone May Have the Harmony

by recoveringrabbit



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, FS Music Challenge, Pre-Relationship, Soulmate AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 03:32:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7343068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your song is yourself, the musical manifestation of your character and dreams and abilities and potential. It plays in your head at all times. You can share it with anyone you like, but doing so hands the other person complete knowledge of your intimate self. </p><p>But, if you're lucky, you find the person with whom your song blends, and that's what's called soulmates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anyone May Have the Harmony

“Come on, man. You must know something.”

Fitz looked across the booth at her and grimaced, rubbing his shoulder where Mendoza, their sometimes-friend/sometimes housefly, had rammed into it. “First, if Simmons doesn’t want to tell you I absolutely won’t. Second, why would I know anything? Do you know anything about your lab partner’s soul song?”

Just back from picking up their latest round of drinks, the fourth member of their party, Jacobs, slid the pints around the booth and tossed her braid over her shoulder. “No, but I haven’t been with my lab partner for five years. And I don’t live with her, either.”

“Six years,” they corrected in unison. Jemma took a swig of her beer to hide from the significant glances Jacobs and Mendoza exchanged and immediately regretted it. Why did she drink this rotten stuff, anyway? “Not that it makes a difference,” she said, trying to move on. “Is it true that Martin’s working on a carabineer? Is that for SHIELD or to give him an excuse to go climbing?”

Mendoza, as always, refused to be deterred. “Because I’ve got this friend, great guy, totally cool, but he got his heart broken by a dissonant tune and I don’t want to open him up to it again.”

Another blind date? Jemma sighed heavily. When would SciOps realize she was perfectly happy as she was? “Just because your friend over-shares doesn’t mean I will. If Fitz doesn’t even know—”

“But Fitz would know his.” Mendoza turned to him expectantly. “Come on, man, help a bro out.”

Fitz scowled, poking at the ice in his soda with the end of his straw. “Shut up, Mendoza. It’s not your business or mine.”

She shot him a grateful glance and there the matter rested until Jacobs had excused herself for the night and Mendoza had gotten himself well and truly pie-eyed. As they stood on the curb waiting for Mendoza’s taxi to arrive, the other agent threw his arm over Fitz’s shoulders, the beery gusts of his breath hitting Jemma even where she stood at Fitz’s other side. “It’s me, okay. I’m my friend. Can’t you give me one teeny, tiny clue? Since you osbivosly”—he stopped, started again—“obviously don’t notice how amazing Simmons is—”

“I notice,” Fitz said. Then, sighing, he shrugged off Mendoza. “Look, I can’t say anything about Simmons, okay? We’ve never been played in concert. But—B-flat.”

Jemma sucked in a silent gasp and instinctively flung out a hand for balance. Had the world shifted on its axis? It seemed possible. Any impossibility was, if Fitz was B-flat. Anything was, if they weren’t in tune after all.

The cab pulled up as Mendoza’s face crumpled. “I’m C. That’ll never work.”

“Nope.” Fitz opened the door and managed to sling Mendoza inside, halfway in the backseat to buckle him before she had a chance to do more than open her mouth. “Besides, if she was interested in you she would have sat next to you instead of making me do it, you ninny. Learn to read the signs. And maybe talk to _her_ instead of me.” Giving the driver Mendoza’s address, he slammed the door and came back to stand beside her as she blankly watched the taxi drive off. She put the keys into his hand wordlessly and stalked towards their car, leaving him to follow. Her head was too loud for talk.

They were halfway home before the frantic violins got to be too much and the words spilled out in spite of her. “We’re not in tune, Fitz.”

His hands stopped drumming on the wheel and he braked at the stop sign faster than was strictly necessary. “What do you mean? Course we are. We’ve always been.”

“No, we aren’t.”

“Simmons, we are.”

“No, Fitz—” Her wretched voice cracked and she clenched her fist tighter. “If you’re B-flat we _aren’t_ , because I’m not. I’m not B-anything. And if we aren’t in the same key, being the same tempo or meter or time signature is essentially irrelevant. And if we aren’t in tune—”

“Simmons.” She recognized his relieved laugh, the quick sound that was more a noisy breath than anything else. “Do not scare me like that again. Of course I’m not B-flat.”

“Not B-flat,” she repeated, unsure how many times the world could leap up in the air and come down again differently in one night.

He sent her a gently mocking smirk as he flicked on the turn indicator. “Not B-anything. Do you think I would tell Mendoza, of all people, what key I’m in? I just wanted to get him off our back.”

“I did think it was a little strange that you would tell him when you’ve never told me,” she said slowly, logic trickling back from wherever it had fled to. “We’ve always agreed that it’s—”

“Private, yeah. But he wasn’t going to let up, so I threw him a false trail.”

“You could have been wrong.”

“Simmons, really,” he said, “everyone knows Mendoza’s a C. He practically introduces himself with it.” His eyes widened. “Unless you wanted to go out with him and I mucked it up?”

“Ugh, Fitz, no. He’s most _definitely_ not my type.”

“No? But he’s so well-formed and symmetrical.”

“Shut up.”

He made an obvious point of closing his mouth and turned his attention back to the road, leaving her to process. What exactly she was processing she didn’t know; things had simply returned to the status quo, hadn’t they? Still, she couldn’t help but feel unsettled. Perhaps it was just the uncertainty. It was never entirely easy to have one’s underlying assumptions challenged. She wondered if it had ever occurred to Fitz, that they might not—but it couldn’t have, or he wouldn’t be so sure. She wished she could have his certainty.

“Anyway,” he said finally, “key signature isn’t everything.”

She sighed, leaning her head against the seat. “I don’t understand the fascination with telling people. It’s an unhealthy shortcut to intimacy. Just because you’re in the same key doesn’t mean you’ll be good for each other or work well together; you have to build it up, don’t you? And if you work at it enough you can get on with nearly anyone.”

“ _You_ could. Not everyone.”

“But you know what I mean.”

“Yes, but you’re being inconsistent.”

Used to his intellectual critiques, she didn’t take offence. “Where?”

He pulled into their parking space and switched off the car, turning to face her. “Simmons, you were just in a state of panic because you thought we weren’t—”

“I was not in a state of panic!” she protested, face growing warm.

“—yes, you were, I haven’t seen you that tense since you thought you mislabeled those petri dishes—weren’t in tune, but that’s directly the opposite of your theory. Either you’re letting your personal feelings overcome the correct interpretation of the results or you’re just being inconsistent.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “it’s different. You and I are different than just co-workers or friends. People don’t get married without being _at least_ in tune and preferably harmonic—”

He looked away quickly. “We’re not married. We’re not even—”

“Yes, but we’re more than those other things too. Fitz, you’re my best friend in the world.”

The words resonated through the car, hanging in the air and snaking their way through her ensemble. The violins picked them up, the flute, the horns, the cellos bowed them until she wondered how she hadn’t heard them there before. _My best friend in the world_. She swallowed, tucking her hair behind her ear. Why was she finding it hard to meet his eyes? She had only stated the truth.

He cleared his throat. “So you’re saying that level one relationships, as it were, aren’t dependent on soul songs, but deeper relationships are?”

No response to her declaration, then. Just back to the hypothesis at hand. Blinking away her disappointment, she nodded. “Because of the depth of soul shared. I can get on with Mendoza because we don’t have to connect at any kind of real level. I couldn’t ever be with him more than this because we’re fundamentally dissimilar. That’s why married people want to harmonize—they’re sharing their whole souls. If they were dissonant—” She stopped when she saw his mouth tighten. “Well, you know what happens then.”

They both fell silent, thinking of the many couples they had known who insisted soul songs didn’t matter only to flame out spectacularly. It was impersonal for her, but Fitz had seen it in his own home.

“But we,” she said, staring through the windshield, “we’re the same. At least, I always thought we were the same.”

“We _are_ the same.” He reached out and covered her fist, stroking his thumb across her knuckles. Her heart stuttered in her chest. She couldn’t remember the last time Fitz had initiated physical contact. “You’re my best friend in the world too, Jemma, and you will be whatever our songs are like.” Taking a deep breath, he squeezed her hand. “E. 6/8. _Allegro_.”

If her heart had stuttered before, now it was outright speechless. Tears sprang to her eyes without permission and she was grateful for the darkness of the car. “Me too,” she said. “All those. It’s an ensemble, not a band. Classical.”

“Me too,” he said. “See? We’re good.”

“Good.”

The silence enveloped them and it wasn’t silent at all, but full. Something was thrumming, buzzing, singing—it wasn’t her, but it was, but it was something else, something more. If she didn’t know it was impossible to hear someone else’s song, she would have thought—but it was, of course. Jemma looked down at their hands and tried to steady her breathing. Was he hearing this, too?

Then he yelped, complaining loudly about how cold her hands were, and the moment broke in the middle of a phrase. She fell on his comment with rather more heat than it deserved, resulting in a good-natured tiff that lasted all the way upstairs. Jemma felt, on the whole, rather relieved. In the impersonal light of the lift and hallway, it seemed more reasonable and less dramatic that she and Fitz had finally confirmed their long-held hypothesis. Yes, it was significant that he had entrusted her with the information, but he had trusted her with his pin code a long time ago. They were best friends. Best friends knew these kinds of things.

The strain of oddly-familiar music had vanished, as well, so there was nothing to indicate that anything of note had happened. So she put it aside, wrapping it up like a Christmas ornament to be brought out at the proper moments.

One thing still niggled, though. Long after they had said good night, she crept to his room and knocked softly. “Fitz? Still up?”

“Come in.”

He was sitting on the bed in a round circle of light, journal in hand and an uncapped pen in his mouth. “Sitting?” he mumbled around it.

She shook her head and leaned against the jamb. “I was only wondering: why B-flat?”

His eyebrows drew together briefly. “Well, B-flat’s the key the universe—”

“Resonates in,” she said with him, and he nodded.

“I just thought, if for some reason you weren’t E like me, you’d be B-flat. Like the universe. It suits you.”

“I harmonize with the cosmos?”

He offered a half-smile. “Yes.”

Jemma pressed her lips together, hoping to hide the wide smile she felt creeping through her chest. It didn’t quite work, but well enough that she thought he might not know that was the nicest compliment she had ever received. “Good night, Fitz.”

“Good night.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a portion of a bigger story, but as I have no idea when that will be finished (except before Christmas!) please enjoy this bit. More will come, I promise!
> 
> Thanks to agent85 for her encouragement that this wasn't completely off the wall, and with much love to my musician sister even if she does insist on supporting the opposite team.


End file.
